Identikit MarxoCatholic man

The cast of professors is stunning but will they actually spend much time on the new campus? “They won’t give tutorials, but they will be partners, bringing advice and expertise. I want to recreate the experience I had at Oxford. I was very intensively tutored in my college but could also go and hear some amazing and extraordinary lectures.”

That’s what I thought it was about. I thought that because it was one of the many things we talked about over tea a few weeks ago. We talked about the one-on-one tutorial – I from the point of view of one who had never experienced such a thing but only envied it, he from the point of view of one who had. I thought of that as soon as I read about the NCH on Sunday…unlike Terry Eagleton.

The master of the college will be public sage and identikit Islington Man, AC Grayling. …Anyway, why should anyone be surprised at the prospect of academics signing on for a cushy job at 25% more than the average university salary, with shares in the enterprise to boot?

What would prevent most of us from doing so is the nausea which wells to the throat at the thought of this disgustingly elitist outfit. British universities, plundered of resources by the bankers and financiers they educated, are not best served by a bunch of prima donnas jumping ship and creaming off the bright and loaded. It is as though a group of medics in a hard-pressed public hospital were to down scalpels and slink off to start a lucrative private clinic. Grayling and his friends are taking advantage of a crumbling university system to rake off money from the rich. As such, they are betraying all those academics who have been fighting the cuts for the sake of their students.

Downing scalpels and going off to a private (and Catholic, at that) university (that charges £27,000 a year) instead of staying home to fight the cuts. What a steaming self-righteous hypocrite Terry Eagleton is, and a bullying toady of the church into the bargain. He sneers at NCH for being unlikely to have a theology department. Yes really!

27 Responses to “Identikit MarxoCatholic man”

I heard Feagletosh on Nightwaves on Radio3 the other night, and he really is insufferable. Somehow he seems incapable of understanding the saw about “not letting perfection be the enemy of good enough”.

If not everyone can have an education in the humanities, then noöne must get an education in the humanities.

My first reaction when reading Eagleton’s piece was, “hey look it’s yet another episode in the interminable public ticklefight between Terry Eagleton and Anthony Grayling.” Dunno if there’s anything here to change that view.

Anyway. The substantive points Eagleton and Jenkins raised should weigh heavily on the minds of anyone who cares about the state of higher education in the UK. I mean, not very long ago there were riots in Britain over the tripling of tuition fees, and now this new private college proposes to double the tripling. That’s a pretty breathtaking state of affairs.

“The tripling of tuition fees” means: all the publicly-funded universities were going to start charging 3x more than they did before.

“Proposes to double the tripling” means: one new institution is going to charge twice as much as all those publicly-funded universities, without any change to what they charge.

One of these things is not like the other.

I think Grayling’s new boondoggle seems like a pretty silly idea, unlikely to do much good to anyone (though it may, if it happens to be popular, make a few people rich), but some of the criticism of it seems quite detached from reality.

Isn’t elitism kind of the whole point of a university system? And what exactly is wrong with medics in a “hard-pressed public hospital” deciding to open a private clinic? I mean, surely the problem is the “hard-pressed” part, which is best solved at the political or administrative level. Blaming the medics (or teachers) for leaving an under-resourced, frustrating career where they have no real power to improve the situation for a better-paid more enjoyable job is kind of stupid.

g, yes, and that was exactly what I meant. I could have been clearer about that point. It just didn’t occur to me that anyone would read the passage in any other way, since the only other plausible reading is absurd.

The problem overall is that UK HE ‘opinion’ is dominated by people who really, really do believe that they are a world-leading intellectual research elite and should be permitted to do very little teaching, AND that students should have free access to teaching at their institutions. On top of that, they also seem to believe that standards are being maintained across the system, while grades are inflating to the points where an overall majority of students are significantly ‘above average’… And that, if there is a problem, it can be solved by giving their institutions more money and more autonomy [as long as it’s only the sort of ‘autonomy’ that allows them to ignore the policy of the government that’s giving them the money, and not the sort that might lead management to pursue other revenue-streams].

In short, there is very little about which the noisemakers in UK HE don’t have their heads up their arses.

This idea of private and expensive education has been around in Britain for about seven centuries at the primary and secondary levels – name your favourite “public” school here. Why not apply the concept at the undergraduate level? As Adam points out it works fine in the USA. Although I don’t see why a college of the humanities should have a theology department. Doesn’t that belong in the anthropology school?

Rainman, that’s an astonishing claim. Dawkins is the anti-teleologist, and he goes out of his way to emphasize that evolution is not a goal-directed process. You don’t get to make these claims without backing them up. What’s your evidence?

I’m not sure what the fuss is. However, an NCH education will apparently get you a University of London degree. I suspect that there might be a fuss if an expensive private school were set up, where you got University Of California at Berkeley degrees.

I think you’re right that there would be a fuss if that happened, but then Berkeley gives its own degrees. From what I’ve read over the past few days, I gather that U of London international degrees are granted via an exam (a tough one) and that there are quite a few crammers and colleges that prepare students to take that exam. It can be done cheaply or expensively. There’s nothing new or weird about another college doing the same thing. So the parallel isn’t exact.

I take the point to be that the NCH will prep students to take the exam, like other colleges and crammers, and in the process it will give them a dam’ good education, in particular one that teaches scientific reasoning to humanities students, that offers intensive tutoring, and that offers frequent lectures on a range of subjects. It’s exam-prep plus.

rainman, whoever you are, don’t make goofy assertions and leave it at that. It’s about as interesting and worthwhile as saying Sarah Palin is a socialist or the pope is an atheist or Terry Eagleton is a reasonable guy.

But Ophelia, Ratzinger *is* an atheist. In his own words, atheists and secularists are (i) responsible for the sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests, and (ii) were the proximate cause of the rise of fascism in 20th century Europe. History shows that (i) Ratzinger was involved in covering up and thus facilitating the ongoing sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests and (ii) the Catholic Church was a staunch supporter of Mussolini, Franco, Salazar, and Petain. Therefore, Ratzinger is a secular atheist.

Many of us remember when tuition fees were paid for by your local authority and you got a means-tested maintenance grant, too. My university education cost very little, because my parents didn’t earn much so paid little parental contribution to the grant. Expanding student numbers to mask youth unemployment, lowering admission standards to make this possible, and turning polytechnics into ‘universities’ have been disastrous in devaluing degrees.

Since I teach at a ‘former polytechnic’, I can tell you quite plainly that we have been offering degrees since long before we became a university, and that we haven’t lowered any standards in the last 20 years. Evidence for this is that only about half our students get 2.1s and 1sts. Institutions that, 20 years ago, awarded around the same proportion, and now regularly award over 85% of their students such ‘good’ degrees, might be asked questions, however. Since, unfortunately, many of them are ‘elite’ institutions, those questions don’t get asked.

There are ‘pile ’em high’ institutions out there, I’ll grant you, but many of them were never polys in the first place.

For that kind of money, I would demand a team of live-in, round-the-clock tutors, ready to fill me in about Renaissance art or logical positivism at the snap of a finger. I would also expect them to iron my socks and polish my boots.

I do hope that this particular piece of drivel from Professor Eagleton has been widely circulated among the students and staff of Notre Dame.